Messages - entitatitivity

This is the kind of analyzing that you do only when you are a law student with your law professors:

Burglary = The breaking and entering the house of another in the night time, with intent to commit a felony therein, whether the felony be actually committed or not.

- Breaking can be either actual, such as by forcing open a door, or constructive, such as by fraud or threats. Breaking does not require that anything be "broken" in terms of physical damage occurring. A person who has permission to enter part of a house, but not another part, commits a breaking and entering when they use any means to enter a room where they are not permitted, so long as the room was not open to enter.

- Entering can involve either physical entry by a person or the insertion of an instrument with which to remove property. Insertion of a tool to gain entry may not constitute entering by itself. Note that there must be a breaking and an entering for common law burglary. Breaking without entry or entry without breaking is not sufficient for common law burglary.

- Although rarely listed as an element, the common law required that entry occur as a consequence of the breaking. For example, if a wrongdoer partially opened a window by using a pry bar and then noticed an open door through which he entered the dwelling, there is no burglary at common law. The use of the pry bar would not constitute an entry even if a portion of the prybar "entered" the residence. Under the instrumentality rule the use of an instrument to effect a breaking would not constitute an entry. However, if any part of the perpetrator's body entered the residence in an attempt to gain entry, the instrumentality rule did not apply. Thus, if the perpetrator uses the prybar to pry open the window and then used his hands to lift the partially opened window, an "entry" would have taken place when he grasped the bottom of the window with his hands.

- House includes a temporarily unoccupied dwelling, but not a building used only occasionally as a habitation

- Night time is defined as hours between half an hour after sunset and half an hour before sunrise

- Typically this element is expressed as the intent to commit a felony "therein." The use of the word "therein" adds nothing and certainly does not limit the scope of burglary to those wrongdoers who break and enter a dwelling intending to commit a felony on the premises. The situs of the felony does not matter, and burglary occurs if the wrongdoer intended to commit a felony at the time he broke and entered.

NOW, we all know, that out there in the real world things are not handled this way - stressing upon each word like crazy! What I am saying is that in practice - for lawyers too - common sense is the one that applies. Or to put it in those other words, KISS!

So, there you have it - the degrees of the closet - or "outness" - if you like. It is controversial whether outing a gay person is beneficial to the society and/or that person himself. Personally I think it does not make sense to out plain folk people, while it does to out public figures/people in authority.

Usually, the outed gay individual would go after a journalist and his newspaper who outed him. But even such lawsuits have proved unsuccessful in the long run. Here it is the Cruise's case with South Park:

The relevant "South Park" episode -- entitled "Trapped in the Closet" -- self-consciously skirts the outermost edges of the First Amendment's protection for parody. A court would probably deem it constitutionally protected, but only barely. Defamation requires a "statement of fact" -- and for this reason, most parody, because of its fictional nature, falls outside defamation law by definition.

But this is the rare parody that, fairly read, does make a statement of fact. In the episode, the animated version of Cruise literally goes into a closet, and won't come out. Other characters beg him to "come out of the closet," including the animated version of his ex-wife, Nicole Kidman. The Kidman character promises Cruise that if he comes out of the closet, neither she nor "Katie" will judge him. But the Cruise character claims he isn't "in the closet," even though he plainly is. No one could miss that the episode's creators are taking a stance and making a statement -- that the real Cruise is gay and hiding it.

The use of the euphemism "in the closet" -- used to refer to someone who is homosexual but who has not admitted his or her homosexuality to friends, family, or the public -- is transparent. Interestingly, the episode itself indicates that its creators know well that they may be defaming Cruise, and they know of his litigious history. The joke disclaimer preceding the episode announces that "All characters and events on this show -- even those based on real persons -- are entirely fictional."

At the end of the episode, the Cruise character threatens to bring a suit (not on the gay issue, but in defense of Scientology) "in England" -- which lacks a formal equivalent of the First Amendment. And all the credits at the end use the pseudonyms "John Smith" and "Jane Smith." Since the episode does indeed make a "statement of fact," the parody exception to defamation law won't save "South Park." Thus, the creators' only weapon against a possible suit by Cruise is a First Amendment defense. Fortunately for them, the Supreme Court has interpreted the defense very broadly.

[...] It's one thing to co-opt part of a song, or use a trademark, in a parody: Without using part of the original, the parody won't work at all; no one will know what its target is. But it's another thing to embed what would otherwise be a defamatory statement in a work of fiction: This is defamation in satire's clothing, and it's only in order to protect true satire that that the Constitution has been held to also protect this lesser creature. Generally, courts don't want to get into the business of picking out nuggets of fact from an otherwise fictional account. The upshot, though -- and courts know this, and accept this cost in the service of free speech -- is that parody and satire inevitably may become a refuge for rogues who seek to defame without liability. That seems to me to be just what's happening with respect to the "South Park" episode.

I'm not sure I understand the "statement of fact" thing stressed upon by the lawyer here - SP maintains that the whole thing is a parody, characters are all fictional - everything seems OK, with the FA protection in mind.

I mean, you have tabloids (papers) claiming outright that Cruise is gay - I just don't get the overanalyzing kind of thing that the Yale lawyer is doing in the case of SP.

As I understand it, you don't have to actually go with a guy to have a baby. I think I am goin' for it!

Mother here ... I was like, do I post post this, or is it better not to post it at all ... but then, I thought, I'm gonna post it anyway ... I am aware that talking about two men having a baby sounds crazy and that several posters on this board may ridicule the idea ... now, I don't know if I'm being naive, but science has made possible for us things that 50 years ago we'd think were impossible ... my question is - is this something that scientists are working on and that they are bound to bring to fruition? I have a son who's gay, who very much loves his partner - I know deep down myself he loves children, it's just that he does not go with women. I sometimes 'rave' he might have a biological child with his partner, his boyfriend ... now I wonder, is this just a poor woman's imagination, or something that will come true sooner or later?

Meria, in all due respect, I'm trying to think what is it that you're really thinking?! You say, "it's 'just' that he does not go with women" - I mean, what's that supposed to mean - for this kind of thing, going with women really matters!

Just take a look at the date the electronic article was posted on BBC - more than 10 years ago - doesn't that make you think they're not making their "best efforts" on that?!

spillover - I would take a different approach - I don't want the poster who was asking on the status of the all-male-babies thing to misunderstand me or something, but I would suggest, quite simply, the two males having babies concieved by one or both of them (with eggs donated by women). I would not think the two of them would not love the baby/-ies enough, just like they love each-other.

I am sure there's an ethical issue here. I don't doubt that there are many of you out there who might think there's not; I was discussing the other day this other scenario with a few people and, to my astonishment, most of them thought there's nothing wrong with it: Here it is:

X serves as a diplomatic officer of the Dominican Republic in Spain. He's being transfered to the US, in New York City to serve as an officer for his country. The CIA and FBI conduct surveillance of his activities while he's in NYC and find out he frequents gay bars and has promiscuous homosexual sex with many men. They take pictures of him to serve as evidence of his homosexuality. He is approached to become an agent for the CIA, otherwise his country authorities would be provided with the above-mentioned proof of his homosexuality. In his country being overtly homosexual is a bar to employment in the diplomatic service. Is it ethical for the CIA to do such a thing? Well, all of the people I was having the discussion said "yes," except for two of us.

This is a very curious hypo - one that unfortunately can not work in practice - the only way it could work is in the form of one-shot deal.

I just do not get it how an experienced diplomatic officer who's is not the first time to serve (the hypo mentions he's been before in Spain) can get so easily compromised when having sex with other men - sure, he's from the Dominican Republic, probably not trained and the like, but it still strikes me as odd that he'd be actually photographed in the actual process (of having sex)! I mean, with the curtains and blinds, and all kinds of things you have in there available?! (I wouldn't think he'd have sex out there in an open public area, where a few shots could easily be taken)

In "Valide," Ms. Chase-Riboud returns to those themes, this time against a drastically different backdrop. Exploration of the complex institution of slavery in another culture - the sultan's harem of the Ottoman Empire during the late 18th and early 19th centuries - has prompted some interesting changes in Ms. Chase-Riboud's thinking. Ms. Chase-Riboud's second novel makes a broader and more radical point: love is impossible in a slave society, where absolute power over other human beings poisons all personal relationships and eliminates the possibility of free choice that is at the root of all real love.

"Valide's" story concerns a young woman from Martinique who is captured by pirates in 1781 and sold into the harem of the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid I. Renamed Naksh-i-dil (Embroidered Tongue), she survives the mortal intrigues of harem life to become Ikbal, the favorite of the Sultan. She bears him a son and is elevated to the rank of Kadine, one of his seven official wives. When that son becomes Sultan in 1807, she gains the position of Valide, the pinnacle of power for a woman in this society: "The Ottomans accepted that a Sultan could have many wives, but he could have only one Empress. Thus the mother of the Sultan occupied the unique place of honor that nothing could alter save death. She was entrusted with the most intimate and private possessions of her son - his women. From slave, she had become master, from prisoner to jailer, from property to absolute despot."

Those four sentences encapsulate several of Ms. Chase-Riboud's themes - maternity as a woman's principal means to power, the meaninglessness of sexuality in a society where women's bodies are men's absolute possessions, and the paradoxical nature of an empire where monarchs are the sons of slaves and one of those slaves will rise after a lifetime of subjection to rule. Unfortunately, this passage is typical of the book's stilted, unreal prose - though mercifully free of the baroque trimmings that elsewhere threaten to give an essentially serious novel the overheated sensibility of a bad romance. The language in "Valide" seldom lives up to the ideas.

Still, the ideas themselves are provocative. Particularly intriguing is Ms. Chase-Riboud's analysis of the harem, a much more vivid character than any of the book's individuals. We are in a world of sensuality, boredom and futility where women are reduced to the basic functions of sex and childbearing, but the vast majority of the Sultan's female slaves will never even sleep with him, let alone have his child. Power is gained through artifice, manipulation and murder. Slaves can no more love one another than they can their master, because each woman is an enemy in the ceaseless struggle to catch the Sultan's eye.

The rulers are no less crippled by this system than the ruled; the Sultan's sons, locked away in the Prince's Cage to protect them from poisoning, know as little of the outside world as the most ignorant harem inhabitant. Abdulhamid, Naksh-i-dil realizes, "had the mentality of a slave.... He was, as much as she, a prisoner in his own palace." The novel contrasts the self-defeating insularity of the Ottomans with the will to change found in their traditional enemy, Russia, which is shown struggling to face the challenge of the West and modernize under the leadership of Catherine the Great. Naksh-i-dil both admires and hates Catherine, as an example of what women can do with power and a reminder of her own ineffectiveness. "Valide" is so crammed with incident, especially in the second half, that we lose the heroine amid the crowds of subsidiary characters (most not nearly as interesting as their author finds them) and the rapid flow of public events. Ms. Chase-Riboud has clearly thought long and hard about slavery - what it does to the people caught up in it and, more fundamentally, what aspects of human nature its existence expresses - but these thoughts lack a successful fictional context in "Valide." Nonetheless, she has large ambitions and an important subject, both fine things for a novelist. Perhaps in her next book they will be realized more completely.

Chase-Ribaud appears to have a very good imagination. They say she gets her ideas for her books from her dreams - you know, being this queen who has a harem of 50 naked males she can choose from - stuff like that...

We all get ideas from dreams to use in various things - but dreams of this type on her part (where you've read it, btw?) would appear quite strange and funny to me!

Not really! As the glut of excess lawyers continues unabated (and as technology makes many things possible with far fewer lawyers) further adjustments are not far behind. Currently, the top 10-15% (gradewise) from 1st tier schools (roughly, the 40 or so best schools in the U.S.) go to two kinds of jobs. They go to "traditional firms" (these firms used to hire from the top 50%) and government jobs (that used to go to the bottom 50% of the class from the bottom 50% of the schools). Worse, after a year of so of looking for work, the very status of length out of law school is a permanent barrier to most employment. A history in a small firm, as a solo or in a District Attorney's Office qualifies an attorney only to go to work for herself or himself.

The "ticket punching" era has come to an end -- in some states slowly, in some states with great drama. In one instance (when the great "crunch" hit Texas) schools went from full placement by Christmas of the senior year to 20% placement at graduation in the course of one class. Virtually all of the Harvard class of '75 made partner by the 10-year reunion. Of the Harvard class of '85, so few made partner by the 10-year reunion it was a Section B front page story in the Wall Street Journal.

What really gets me is how does the site allows posters with avatars such as this one's? Is this place for law students or law whores?

Try to be a lil' bit more open-minded Hayde!

I don't really think they police the site to that extent - oh, one more thing, Hayde, law students and law whores are two different things indeed, just don't confuse them with each-other..

I concur, externship - it takes a while for a law student to become a law whore!

Beyond a simple condemnation of authoritarian value systems, Fromm used the story of Adam and Eve as an allegorical explanation for human biological evolution and existential angst, asserting that when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, they became aware of themselves as being separate from nature while still being part of it. This is why they felt "naked" and "ashamed": they had evolved into human beings, conscious of themselves, their own mortality, and their powerlessness before the forces of nature and society, and no longer united with the universe as they were in their instinctive, pre-human existence as animals. According to Fromm, the awareness of a disunited human existence is a source of guilt and shame, and the solution to this existential dichotomy is found in the development of one's uniquely human powers of love and reason.

They say LSD induces an experience that will make you appreciate exactly what Fromm talks about here - being one with the nature, the Whole.

LSD "opens people up" - Timothy Leary used to say that LSD was the most powerful aphrodisiac ever discovered - compared with sex under LSD, the way you have been making love -- no matter how ecstatic the pleasure you think you get from it – is like making love to a department-store-window dummy.

The three inevitable goals of the LSD session are to discover and make love with God, to discover and make love with yourself, and to discover and make love with another person.

Excuse my level of detail now, but are you aware of the straight/married men's paranoia? The kind of unhealthy paranoia that white-collar "straight" guys entertain, because of the way the society they're part of, expects them to be and behave?! These "straight" men will NEVER, EVER have a photo online. They talk for hours online, needing to be convinced, only to NEVER show up to meet anyone in person. They will play e-mail games wherein they'll send 15 messages back and forth and mysteriously STOP responding the moment they're asked to put up or shut up (they choose "shut up"). "Straight" men make a big deal out of telling you about their wives and girlfriends and how they are able to "get away" with it, which is what they actually do not.

[...]

You've got to love how these "straight" men orgasm in less than 60 seconds, the minute they LOOK at a penis in real life. That sure is HOT! You've got to love how straight men tell you they have "no experience" and have only "sucked one cock." You've to actually look at these men, who are not sure who or what they are, and who are lacking in any sort of self-confidence whatsoever, pretending to be one thing and actually being something else.

[...]

mauchly, it's not that simple - many straight men do not have the right information about their body (and its needs) - you would be surprised to learn what kinds of fears they entertain with regard to the sexual contact with other men!

I work as a nurse for a community hospital that also caters to the gay community - we get all too often gay men in the closet, from miles and miles away, who ask us for condoms and other stuff related specifically to gay sex - in the process we are shocked to find out how naive they are, as well as what tight attitudes they have in relation to the whole thing!